Present day X-spectrometers are highly developed with many facilities for facilitating the calibration of instrument parameters and the registration of measurements. In all chemical analytical processes the calibration of the instrument to be used is both time consuming and an important part of the process. This applies, for instance, to the calibration of the parameters of the instrument used, the supervision of the calibrations made, or in other words the control of the operational reliability of the instrument used and, not least, the work involved in the validation of the chemical analytical process that has been developed and its documentation. The process proposed enables the work involved to be greatly simplified and the process by which this can be achieved will be described hereinafter for a simple case in which X-ray fluorescence analysis has been applied.
All chemical-analytical methods are based on some physical-chemical property of an element which shall be characterized by measuring this property or established in some other way. In addition, it is necessary in the majority of cases also to determine a background, the reason for which background is often unknown. In other words, it is necessary to establish when calibrating an element at least two properties (two points). This also applies to determining the concentration of the element with respect to a standard that is used in the validation of an analytical process.
A calibration is thus usually carried out with the aid of one or more samples per element with the subsequent determination/measurement of the background of the element concerned.
A method of how calibration of an element can be carried out with the aid of a glass standard containing a “highly pure” chemical has been described in an earlier article by the inventor, “Application of J. E. Fernández algorithms in the evaluation of X-ray intensities measured on fused glass discs for a set of international standards and a proposed calibration procedure”, J. Malmqvist; X-RAY SPECTROMETRY; X-Ray Spectrom 2001; 30:83-92. Thus, in the case mentioned there is required one standard for each element to be calibrated. This article shall be included as a part of the present application.
The present invention solves the problem mentioned above.